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Global Warming Research is Useless
From the horses mouth, Kevin Trenberth, head of the large US National Centre for Atmospheric Research and a lead author for the IPCC has made comments on Nature magazines blog about the computer models (General Circulation Models or GCM's) used in scaring people about global warming. Some of his comments

...there are no (climate) predictions by IPCC at all. And there never have been". Instead, there are only "what if" projections of future climate that correspond to certain emissions scenarios.

[GCM's] do not consider many things like the recovery of the ozone layer, for instance, or observed trends in forcing agents"

None of the models used by IPCC is initialised to the observed state and none of the climate states in the models corresponds even remotely to the current observed climate

The state of the oceans, sea ice and soil moisture has no relationship to the observed state at any recent time in any of the IPCC models

There is neither an El Nino sequence nor any Pacific Decadal Oscillation that replicates the recent past; yet these are critical modes of variability that affect Pacific rim countries and beyond . . . the starting climate state in several of the models may depart significantly from the real climate owing to model errors" and "regional climate change is impossible to deal with properly unless the models are initialised

[GCMs] assume linearity [which] works for global forced variations, but it cannot work for many aspects of climate, especially those related to the water cycle . . . the science is not done because we do not have reliable or regional predictions of climate".

More useful info from the article

a lead author of the IPCC Working Group 1 science report, Jim Renwick, recently admitted "climate prediction is hard, half of the variability in the climate system is not predictable, so we don't expect to do terrifically well".

Professor Bob Carter sums it up well

there is no predictive value in the current generation of computer GCMs and therefore the alarmist IPCC statements about human-caused global warming are unjustified. Yet Australia has an Opposition and a Government that profess to set their climate policies on the basis of IPCC advice. Both also seem determined to impose an inefficient, ineffective and costly carbon trading or taxation system on the economy, for the aspirational absurdity of "stopping climate change".

The science isn't settled, it isn't even useful. Computer models are useless for large complex systems as the IPCC lead author has admitted.
- posted by Alan Grey @ Friday, October 26, 2007